CLARKE: Study of execution lacks depth

The Lynching of Peter Wheeler is Debra Komar’s second non-fiction study of a historical crime. In this case, Wheeler, convicted and executed for the 1896 rape and murder of 14-year-old Annie Kempton in Bear River, is shown to have been the innocent victim of popular prejudice, police persecution, and yellow-press racism.

A globe-trotting, forensic anthropologist and now an Annapolis Royal-based author, Komar follows in the footsteps of the American forensic scientist, Kathy Reichs, in popularizing grisly, true-crime puzzles.

Komar reconstructs well the facts: Kempton was found kneeling, face down, in a bloody puddle, her underclothes disarrayed, her throat slashed, her head bashed.

Wheeler, who found Kempton’s body, was shortly fingered as the prime — and then sole — suspect for the then-incriminating reasons that he was swarthy, a foreigner, and may have engaged in chit-chat with the victim or bantered about her with drinking pals.

Komar makes clear that a kind of local, civil Ku Klux Klan — in judicial black robes, police uniforms, and press badges — conducted the trial-by-media and conviction-by-racism that resulted in Wheeler’s hanging — or legal lynching — in Digby in September 1896.

Although Komar registers racism as a primary reason for Wheeler’s execution, her analysis is superficial. She asserts that, “In 1896 Canada was unfathomably, unrecognizably racist”; she also describes racism as “an artifact of the times.”

Thus, she obscures the ways in which Canada is still unfair to First Nations peoples as well as “visible minorities.”

But Komar’s comment is also weak in its historical application. She allows, “Clashes verging on race wars were inevitable,” but omits the Riel Rebellions on the Prairies and, much closer to home, the 1885 race riot in Bridgetown that put a white man in the grave and a black man on death row.

The Bridgetown history is germane to the Wheeler case, for the 1885 riot was touched off by white males upset by interracial dating, and popular cries for Wheeler’s death were compelled in part by the fancy that a “coloured” man had “outraged” a white woman.

Komar is also uncertain about Wheeler’s “race.” He was, she says, “a dark-skinned man of ambiguous ancestry and indeterminate parentage,” who claimed to be Australian, of parents born in England, but was termed “Spaniard” or “Portuguese” by the press.

Yet, knowing that Wheeler was a native of Mauritius, Komar could have researched the Creoles — or Metis — of that nation, the result of unions, usually between Africans and French, but also sometimes between English and Indian and/or Chinese. (Mauritius flies a “rainbow flag” for this very reason.)

Seldom does Komar recognize the actual, multiracial nature of southwest Nova Scotia, even in 1896. She casts the region as “insular” and the residents as “homogeneous.”

Yet, Bear River was (and is) home to Mi’kmaq, plus there were notable Africadian communities in Lequille and Delaps Cove (both near Annapolis Royal), Bridgetown (Inglewood Road), and in Jordantown and Acaciaville (both near Digby).

No Nova Scotian could have thought the province “whites-only” in 1896. All anyone had to do was read Thomas Chandler Haliburton — or take a train to Yarmouth or Halifax.

Thus, the “lynching” of Wheeler, as a tactic in a “race war,” warned native Africadians — some also part-white and/or part-Mi’kmaq — to “stay poor and powerless, or else.”

(Indeed, the only other person to meet suspicion — briefly — for Kempton’s death was Joseph Pictou, a Mi’kmaq.)

Komar shows that a Halifax detective, Nicholas Power, abetted by the press, led the drive to convict and hang Wheeler, which he achieved by demonizing Wheeler and obfuscating the timeline of Kempton’s murder.

Power deserves disgrace; Wheeler deserves a pardon; and Mauritius deserves an apology from Canada.

Komar’s work could have been stronger had she consulted scholars like Carol Aylward, Afua Cooper, David Steeves, and Barrington Walker, who have pioneered the study of racial injustice meted out in Canadian courts.

She should also restrain her penchant for mixed metaphors: “a sleight-of-hand … worn at the heel.”